Happy New Year everybody!
It is once again that time for another dev-log. The progress on Project Phases has been going very well. Though it is taking quite a bit of time, the battle system is getting closer and closer to it’s final iterations mechanics-wise and there is now a plan for almost everything that will be in the final game. It is all seriously starting to come together and even though there is still a lot of work to do, I’m really excited for how it is shaping up.
However, this dev-log is not about the newest additions to the game. Today I want to talk about my first batch of playtesting for Project Phases. This is honestly a huge deal for me since pretty much up till now, I have been the only one to play my game. While some of my friends have checked it out for brief periods of time, they didn’t play more than a few minutes. Because of this, giving my game out for people to play is unbelievably nerve-racking. I just had no idea what to expect, would they like it or would they think it’s just boring. There was really only one way to find out!
Playtest Development
Before I could give out my game to playtest, I needed to actually have something to playtest. For a long while, the game was just a bunch of testing rooms with a few vague ideas for actual areas. So for the playtest, I wanted to have something more substantial. At this point, I had a rough idea on how I wanted you to progress through the game, so I decided I would flesh that out to completion and then make the playtest the first opening area. This way, all my work on the playtest would translate directly over to the final game rather than having to make more new content.
With the plan in place, I got to work designing and creating all of the areas. This included completing the starting village, Arlette and the first dungeon, the North Cave. Both of these locations should sound very familiar to people who have been following the game for a while. Once that was all said and done, I had all of the areas populated with NPCs, enemies, secrets etc. Speaking of enemies, I also had to decide how enemy encounters were going to work. I decided on overworld enemies which are visible and can be avoided if wanted. They have an aggro radius that, if you enter it, will cause the enemy to run towards you. It’s a fairly basic and typical system, but it works well.
Now that these areas were finished, I could work on the progression from location to location. At the moment, I am not very concerned about the story and for the purposes of the playtest, I just wanted to get the player into the action as quickly as possible. So, I added a quick opening cutscene, and a second cutscene introducing the antagonist of the playtest, a mission to defeat them and that is it in terms of plot. It is very basic, and admittedly quite boring, but at the moment I am not worried about story details, especially for this relatively short playtest. I do plan to make this whole opening section and later parts a lot more story rich. I am a sucker for good stories, and while I’m no writer, I think I can come up with something acceptable.
Next up is something I have been dreading for ages, the in-game tutorial. Sadly, due to the complexity of this game and how unusual it is compared to other RPGs, a proper tutorial is necessary. The issue is, explaining the game in easy to digest terms is very difficult. However, I put my fear aside and designed the tutorial. I tried to make sure that everything that you needed to know to get started was explained while also leaving the door open for more learning opportunities down the line. It was a challenge to be sure, but I got the tutorial in the game and if nothing else, it should teach the player the basics.
Finally, I just wanted to add some final polish things such as music and sound effects. These ended up being more work than I expected, mostly because I didn’t want to rush my way through them and I ended up making a fairly robust sound system that makes it easy to play sounds all over the game. I also had to find sound effects since I didn’t have time to make my own, so I used some from various asset packs I’ve acquired and freesound.org. I do plan to make my own sound effects for the final game, but for now these do just fine.
After many playtests on my end and many bug fixes, I felt ready to release my playtest to a group of playtesters. I created a document explaining how to install the game and added some notes about playtesting such as looking out for bugs. I also created a feedback form for people to fill out when they have finished the game so I could get their detailed opinion on paper. With all that out of the way, I contacted three of my friends to playtest. I would have done more, but I knew I was going to have a lot of things I wanted to change before more people played the game. That first time experience is extremely important, especially when it comes to things like gauging the usefulness of the tutorial. I had to make sure I had some people who haven’t played the game for later playtests. When you only have so many people you can rely on playtesting, you have to play your cards right. With the game now in the hands of others, all I could do was wait for results.
What did they think?
For the feedback, not only did I have the form each person submitted, but I also had the opportunity to watch them play. Two people I watched in person, observing their every move and taking notes and the other recorded their gameplay which I was able to watch. This gave me a really good idea on how people actually play the game on a battle by battle basis. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t go over any specifics that I am not willing to talk about and I will be excluding some interesting findings altogether. That being said, there is still plenty to talk about.
Battle Styles
One immediately surprising thing I noticed was how differently my three testers approached battles. One of my friends bought a bunch of healing items at every opportunity and brute-forced his way through rather than strategizing. Another took their time and analyzed each combination of attacks to find the best strategy. The last one was somewhat in the middle, with some thought put into battles sometimes, but other times just going for the simplest solution. When I asked how they felt about the battle system in general, all of them said they liked it, even though they were all playing in dramatically different ways. I am honestly extremely happy that everyone played differently and all seemed to come to the same result. While it’s still a tiny sample size and they could have all just been trying to be nice and not hurt my feelings, they are my friends after all, I see this as a very encouraging sign that the system I’ve put so much work into is at least not boring.
Information Overload
Another thing that happened is people forgetting crucial information. I think because there is so much thrown at the player at once while introducing the battle system, it’s easy to forget some of the details. Part of this is admittedly due to me cramming everything into the tutorial all at once due to the demo’s short length rather than spreading it out a bit more in a longer game; but part of it also is due to just having a sub-par tutorial. While no one seemed to think the tutorial was bad, they all said it was too long and was just way too much information, a conclusion I feared they would come too. Furthermore, there was a lot of information mentioned in the tutorial that people just seemed to forget, the biggest being the ability to skip timeline phases.
Skipping is an extremely important tool to get you out of unfavorable situations and help reposition your timeline. However, nobody in my group of testers rarely used skip button, and some didn’t at all . Some of them would get frustrated and ask me “what do I even do here?” where I would then remind them of this ability. While it was frustrating that no one used it, the fact that it happened to everyone points to it being a fault of the game and not the player. I asked each person while I was writing this as to why they didn’t use the button and their responses varied. One said they didn’t even remember it was an option, another said it cost too many points and would rather use it on attacking and one said they would have used it more if they could have more easily pictured how it would affect the enemy timelines.
I have a few theories myself. First, I think they saw it more as a last resort rather than a primary tool in their toolbox. I also think some of them saw it as a bad thing since it used points without directly helping you in most cases unlike an attack. Another theory is that skipping and waiting are adjacent to the UI and how they are portrayed, waiting gives you points for waiting through the attack phase, and skipping takes away points for skipping the attack phase. I think people understood skipping as the opposite of waiting rather than it’s own independent action, and since waiting is good and the primary way of gaining points, skipping must be the opposite. My final theory is it was just lost in the shuffle of information, which is the most likely scenario since whenever I reminded people of it the reaction was more in the lines of “I forgot that was there” rather than “I was avoiding using it.”
Whatever the reason aside, I know now in the future I need to better describe the purpose of skipping and consider improving the interface to encourage players to use it more. I also definitely need to work on improving the tutorial in other ways too to make sure players fully grasp the fundamentals of the game.
Unexpected Secrets
As I mentioned before, I hid a few secrets in the overworld for the players to find. I did this to test my world design skills and because secrets are fun. One of my favorite ideas in game design is seeing something barely out of reach and asking “How do I get to that.” It keeps you interested and, if the reward is worth it, it makes you feel super smart. I tried to hide an example of that in the demo and see if people were able to figure it out. I put a chest with the best equipment in the game in the middle of a room you pass through in an inaccessible area when you are first wandering through, but you clearly see it. I also put a locked door in another room. To get the special chest, you have to not only find a second hidden chest containing the key to the locked door, but also make the connection to return to the locked door from earlier. To my surprise, everyone found the secret chest containing the key, and two out of the three people went back to get the equipment. I expected at least one person to miss it, but they all surpassed my expectations.
I also hid a second secret, which was much easier to obtain but didn’t have any indication it existed which made it harder to find. I won’t say where or what it is since I do plan to keep it in the final game, but as I expected no one found it.
What I did not expect at all was a completely obvious chest just sitting out in the open not being found by anyone! There is a chest with a few basic items just sitting in the corners of one of the rooms that no one got. This chest was not intended to be a secret but it almost ended up being one because no one even bothered to check that area of the map. You can even see the chest from the lower level of the map. Look at the top right corner of this gif.
There is also an enemy placed directly next to where the chest is and I think they all simply forgot about it once the battle ended. Whatever the reason, I now know my secret chests need to be better hidden and my overt chest are made more clear.
Version Corrections
Something I have not mentioned yet is the time between each playtester playing the game. Each tester played the game voluntarily and had to make time in their lives to do so. For that, I am grateful, but it did mean it took awhile for some of them to get around to it. So much so that I was able to address an issue from one playtester and give a new version to another. Initially, I didn’t want to do this to help identify common issues with the game, but I realized the direct feedback from a feature added was more valuable than waiting to inevitably hear the same complaint. This means that the final playtester got the best version of the game with some better features. I’ve been lumping all of the feedback from all versions together so far, but let me mention some bigger sticking points and what I did to respond to them.
A big complaint from the first two playtesters was that battles took too long. This was something I was worried about from the beginning. My initial idea was to balance it out by not having many enemy encounters, but even then, you would still dread each encounter not because you didn’t enjoy it, but because you didn’t want to sit there for extended periods of time staring at the same timeline. The solution I came up with instead was adding the ability to fast-forward the timeline. By pressing Shift in battle, you can double the speed at which timeline and all animations happen, allowing for much less waiting. My main fear about adding this was that people would overuse it and miss important actions like an enemy skipping or even a player fainting. However, once I added the feature, in practice, you don’t really use it that much. Once you get to the point where you have three party members fighting against three enemies, there is so much going on and you are constantly going in and out of the attack phase, that fast-forwarding is unnecessary. You can still choose to do it, but it isn’t needed. This is honestly the best case scenario since early battles can now be sped up considerably, helping the simple opening battles from getting too stale before things get more complex and once things do get complex, it’s just a small option you can choose to use at your own leisure. Though it took quite a bit of hassle to get working, I’m very happy I added it and I got good feedback from it too.
Another complaint that I kept getting was the lack of diagonal movement. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but getting diagonal movement working in-game has been an ongoing issue since the start of development. Originally, diagonal movement was in the game, but of the faster variety as in you moved faster on the diagonals than on the primary directions. However, I’ve been trying to get this done properly (where you move the same speed regardless of direction) for ages. However, no matter the implementation, the same issue kept coming up. Something would always violently shake when you moved diagonally. It could be the player or the camera or some other object, but something would always get messed up. There could be several reasons and several solutions to this, but I was never able to figure it out. However, when I created my recent Game Jam game, I created a simple system that locked the player into moving only in four directions because the game’s mechanics required you to be locked into those directions. Since I couldn’t get diagonal movement working properly in Phases, I decided to port this system over. The playtesters hated it and every single one of them complained about the lack of diagonal movement constantly. So, I got to work to finally get diagonal movement working and I’ve finally succeeded. It is not perfect as there is still some graphical distortion when you move diagonally, but the final playtester who used diagonal movement didn’t seem to notice.
Final Thoughts
I’ve honestly just scratched the surface of everything I’ve learned from this small batch of playtesting. I hope you found this as interesting as I did. It is unbelievable how many small things you find out about your game when you see other people playing it. From small possible gameplay tweaks to bugs (so many bugs), I’ve learned a lot and I plan to incorporate all of that new knowledge to make Project Phases even better. I plan to do more playtesting down the line with even more complete versions of the game with more people. Whether or not I write dev-logs on those is yet to be seen.
I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I am excited to see the game reach bigger and better heights as I continue to develop and polish this adventure. As I’ve said before, my updates online may be quite limited during this time to avoid spoilers, but just because you don’t hear from me in a while does not mean the game is cancelled. I’m just hard at work.
Thanks for reading,
Andy